The challenges of conducting lengthy fieldwork in today's busy academic world have impacted the types of research that are able to be carried out. In particular, traditional educational ethnography has become problematic for research beyond initial doctoral research programs. This article analyzes data collected during a return to the field of a…

As aspiring professionals, pre-service teachers must become good consumers of educational research as well as competent researchers who can use tools of inquiry to improve their practice and conduct their own educational research. Many, however, resist learning research skills or find difficulties in doing so. This article presents ways in which…

Today's important geo-spatial technologies, GIS (Geographic Information Systems), GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and Google Earth have been widely used in geography education. Transferring spatially oriented data taken by GPS to the GIS and Google Earth has provided great benefits in terms of showing the usage of spatial technologies for field…

Three general approaches are available to help discipline the use of qualitative methods in educational research without sacrificing subjective understanding, according to this paper. The most private, least confirmable, yet richest approach is the intuitive, which depends on the researcher's thorough immersion in the field setting and…

Noting the increasing interest in qualitative research in general and ethnographic research in particular, the authors of this report clarify the place of the latter within the former. The authors present six criteria for an ethnographic approach to education, illustrated with examples, and discuss ethnography's advantages and disadvantages. The…

Three problems which arise in the analysis of data from natural classroom settings are examined. The effects of the use of different statistical procedures are illustrated with data derived from the 1969 Home Environment and School Study in Canberra. (Author/MLW)

The collection of observational data in natural settings and in real time requires equipment that is light and easily used, and programs that permit rapid and flexible encoding of data. This paper describes a set of four programs for collecting and analyzing continuous time sample, focal-individual data as described by J. Altmann (1974), using a…

The anthropological field study approach is said to provide a means of breaking through the present conceptual framework that purports to understand complex phenomena by breaking them up into separate variables. (AM)

In comparison with traditional experimental design, which is concerned with what happened, a case study approach is more appropriate for answering the question of why or how something happened. As an alternative complementary-vocational-education-evaluation approach, the case study attempts to describe and analyze some program in comprehensive…

In a course entitled "Field Methods for the Study of Education," three themes dominate: professionalism, Darwinian methodology, and application. Unifying these are the notions that the proper use of theory is critical to good ethnography and the natural history/Darwinian paradigm is the central core of the anthropological, ethnological…

Describes a student field project which measured and interpreted ground-level aspects of the urban heat island in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. Discusses procedural steps and decisions, field procedures, data compiling, findings, evaluation, and dissemination of results. (Author/CK)

School context constrains and supports field researchers' data collection activities, just as it can influence the educational change processes being studied. For outsiders, the accessibility of a school is affected by a number of factors. These influence findings and have implications for achieving data comparability across several sites.…

The main purpose in developing the "package" of computer programs described in this guide is to use the automated capability of computers in the enormous job of handling anthropological field data. It is held that ethnography may be threatened with absolescence simply becasue so many man hours are involved in filing and sorting these…

During the 1972-1973 school year the Intercultural Social Studies Project for Secondary Schools created and maintained a culture studies network involving 103 teachers and their students. More than 50 "Fieldstaff Perspectives" were designed in booklet, photograph, map, and simulation-games formats for field testing within the project network.…

A way to assess the large volume of student data generated in an introductory graduate-level course in qualitative research in education is described. Primary attention is given to assessing the technical aspects of field data collection, and only secondary attention is given to the consideration of the substantive aspects of the field data. In…